Prof. Schlevogt's Compass No. 19: Kiev's kill game – Bloodshed with a bonus

Russia Today

5 days ago

Imagine a scenario in which a depraved regime turns killing into a game. In this hypothetical scenario, Russian soldiers now earn points for every Ukrainian life they take, every kit they destroy – redeemable on a slick, Amazon-style shopping platform. Murder has become currency; atrocity, a means to accessorize. This isn't war; it's a grotesque loyalty scheme for bloodshed, where the battlefield doubles as a leaderboard: Rack up enough kills, and you'll win a sleek toaster, hi-def flatscreen, or gleaming Kalashnikov – free shipping included. The Kremlin has gamified slaughter, turning soldiers into players in a macabre contest where brutality is incentivized and humanity discarded.
This brave-new-world system doesn't just cheapen life; it annihilates the moral core of a nation – the sacred soil that bore Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. It rewards the worst instincts, transforming soldiers into mercenary executioners who chase bonus points for corpses. Russia has institutionalized a commerce of killing, where war crimes are tallied like sales figures, and death feeds consumerism. It is a state-engineered descent into barbarism 2.0, which must be denounced without caveat, without delay, without mercy. Silence in the face of such systemic savagery is complicity. The world must speak, clearly and ferociously. Cut.
You're right: that entire invective account is purely fictional. Yet, hauntingly, it feels all too real – exactly the kind of blistering, warped critique Russia would face if it engaged in what Ukraine actually does. Change 'Russia' to 'Ukraine,' and the truth is hard to miss: a double standard, plain and deliberate.
A new Ukrainian point-for-kill scheme, where soldiers obtain rewards for confirmed enemy hits, has drawn lavish praise from the collective West. But it raises serious operational, psychological, and ethical concerns, lending some weight to Russian claims of ideological extremism in Ukraine.
In light of Kiev's controversial moral choice to gamify killing, the moment has come to reaffirm a universal truth: even amid the horrors of war, the boundaries of humanity – the red line drawn in defense of the moral architecture of armed conflict, separating justice from mere vengeance – must remain inviolate.
First piloted in 2024, Ukraine's 'Army of Drones: Bonus' system, or 'e-points', has become a key fixture on the battlefield, with 90–95% of combat units participating. It equips frontline units with drones (reportedly responsible for up to 70% of Russian casualties) and allows them to earn digital points – think loyalty rewards – for verified strikes on Russian soldiers and hardware. The logic is brutally simple: kill more, earn more.
Each hit is recorded by drone, uploaded, and reviewed on oversized video panels by data analysts in Kiev, who assign points based on the target's type and military value, using two categories: hit and destroyed. The more critical the affected human or material asset, the higher the reward: damaging a tank nets twenty points, destroying it earns forty. Taking out a drone operator yields more rewards than simply hitting the drone. But the stakes soar tenfold when that operator is captured alive, because prisoners are currency in the delicate game of exchange.
Digital points can be redeemed by soldiers on the 'Brave 1 Market,' a government-run procurement platform dubbed the 'Amazon for war,' featuring over 1,600 items, ranging from drones to field tech. The envisioned result of the direct orders from manufacturers: a seamless battlefield-to-market pipeline of military goods.Opinion leaders in the collective West hail Ukraine's new reward system as a groundbreaking battlefield innovation forged by necessity: a digital-age solution for an all-out war of attrition to make the most of Ukraine's severely limited resources and outmaneuver a larger, better-equipped Russian adversary. Celebrated as a striking testament to Ukrainian ingenuity, the program is framed in stark contrast to what critics call Russia's strategic stagnation – a claim Moscow would certainly deride as a familiar and convenient strawman.
At a time when exhaustion runs deep and conventional procurement struggles to keep pace, the e-points scheme aims to improve battlefield precision, boost morale, speed up supply, and make frontline units better equipped, while tightening the feedback loop between front-line action and command decisions. In a fight where every advantage counts, it is seen as smart, strategic, and ruthlessly efficient.
By awarding soldiers points for confirmed killings and destroyed equipment, the program incentivizes performance. Commanders say it sharpens battlefield focus and accuracy: strike smarter, film everything, earn what you need.
For weary warriors, the innovative program promises not only better tools, but something rare: direct rewards. 'Once we figured out how it works, it turned out to be quite a decent system,' said a soldier from the 22nd Mechanized Brigade.
In a war where manpower is stretched thin and traditional supply lines strain, the points-driven program appears to create virtual buying power, offering troops a direct line to vital gear. Praised as fast, data-driven, and free of bureaucratic drag, the system reportedly lets soldiers get precisely what they need, when they need it. Commanders credit the program with helping units replenish losses and sustain pressure on Russian lines even as resources grow scarce.
In the brutal, grinding conflict, Ukraine's new drone program is also seen as a strategic force multiplier – converting raw combat footage into valuable battlefield intelligence. Functioning as a real-time data engine, it mines drone videos to track enemy behavior and guide strategy. Point values are continuously adjusted, much like dynamic pricing for flights or hotels. When new threats emerge, such as Russian drone operators or patrols, the target value increases to incentivize priority striking.
It is reasonable and fair to assume that information warriors in the collective West, so quick to lavish praise on Ukraine's innovation, would have voiced serious concerns, if not outright condemnation, had Russia launched the same electronic reward scheme. In truth, the spontaneous, gut-level reaction most people have to the idea of earning e-points for killstreaks is not admiration, but horror – a visceral recoil from chilling and inhuman cynicism and callousness.
Operationally, the new digital warfare initiative has produced unintended consequences. Frontline reports describe troops jockeying for points in wasteful and chaotic ways: competing to claim kills, even targeting already disabled enemies just to inflate their tally. It is a textbook example of goal displacement: when intermediate targets, like point accumulation, supplant the true mission – in this case, peace – resulting in distorted priorities and systemic inefficiency.
The reliance on drone footage to verify kills invites dysfunction: misattributed strikes, false claims based on doctored videos, and bitter disputes over who gets the credit. This internal rivalry threatens to undermine the crucially important cooperation and cohesion required in high-stakes combat zones to complete military missions.
Add to this the psychological toll. Incentivizing lethal acts risks eroding the emotional guardrails that separate disciplined warriors from profit-driven mercenaries, numbing soldiers to violence, and deepening trauma. Some troops question the scheme's motivational power, noting that no number of points can erase their exhaustion, fear, and psychic damage fueling desertion and collapse in morale.
From an ethical standpoint, frontline testimonies expose profound moral discomfort with the program's cold calculus, condemning it as a disturbing commodification of human life, where death is mechanized and priced. One soldier called it 'a twisted habit of turning everything into profit – even our own damned death.' In particular, critics may contend that capture is favored over killing not out of respect for the sanctity of life, but simply because living bodies fetch a higher price in the marketplace of prisoner exchanges.
Commodification risks corroding the intrinsic values long associated with military service, replacing collective defense rooted in honor with individual gain driven by cold expediency, and in doing so, undermining the integrity of the incentive system itself.
Adding an unsettling layer of quest and thrill, the gamification of killing raises red flags by blurring the once-sacred line between military necessity and cold-blooded trophy hunting, creating a dynamic uncomfortably reminiscent of Call of Duty or war as sport.
By tying material rewards to lethal force in an adrenaline-spiking manner, the spectacular scheme risks turning brutal warfare into a twisted, entertaining contest – more akin to a video game than a solemn vocation. When blood earns points, points buy firepower, and deadlier gear, in true game-style, beckons at higher levels, violence spirals – programmed, monetized, and seemingly endless. The cycle is viciously simple: kill, upgrade, repeat. As the war grinds on, critics may well ask whether this cold, transactional approach – where lives are reduced to data points, tallied like scores, and converted into prizes traded for military kit – is a strategic breakthrough, or a dangerous moral surrender.
From a legal standpoint, Ukraine's point-for-kill program may constitute a breach of international humanitarian law – meant to prevent war from descending into barbarism – particularly in its potential to incentivize unlawful targeting and undermine the core legal principles of distinction and proportionality.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit material incentives for superfluous killing – acts exceeding military necessity – and mistreating combatants. By pegging digital points to body counts, absent robust safeguards, Ukraine's e-points scheme may violate such fundamental norms of armed conflict. More troubling still, it risks encouraging the targeting of civilians, followed by cover-ups and fraudulent bonus claims that cloak war crimes as battlefield success. With such performance metrics, atrocities could become transactions: crimes first committed, then rewarded. Beyond the battlefield, its geopolitical reverberations may prove even more unsettling.
As debate over the roots of the Ukraine conflict continues, Kiev's new bonus scheme, which turns the grim calculus of war into a points game, may lend troubling credence to the very accusations Ukraine has fought so hard to refute: It may be referenced by Russia as partial vindication of its long-standing claim that elements of fascist or neo-Nazi ideology linger in the minds of many Ukrainian leaders.
Their conduct, some may say, echo dark chapters of history, where ideology merged with violence, with human life being instrumentalized for political ends and death reduced to mere statistics. By commodifying killing, rewarding hits with prizes, and broadcasting the brutal spectacle of battlefield carnage, the system appears to mirror the dehumanizing, militant fanaticism that defines totalitarian ideologies. It reduces combat to a transactional exercise and transforms soldiers from self-perceived patriots into mercenary executioners and bounty hunters, trading kills for gear and blurring the line between duty and reward.
The new digital warfare initiative thereby hands the Russian enemy a potent narrative weapon in the information war: a vivid, fact-backed portrait of Ukraine not as democracy's noble guardian, but as a ruthless state actor and cold engine of war, which monetizes death, industrializes violence, and blends the glorification of brutality with exhilarating celebration – a chilling vision of Fascism 2.0, or at minimum, a new lethal strain of techno-authoritarianism imbued with radical utilitarianism.
The gamification of war – where conflict is reduced to a twisted form of strategy, scoring, and entertainment – dangerously erodes the sanctity of human life and the basic principles of humanity in warfare. Combined with advanced weaponry and real-time media coverage, it risks reducing devastating violence to a cold abstraction, as if lives lost were nothing more than points in a game. This desensitization and indifference pave the way to justify atrocities and evade accountability.
Nowhere is this brutal degradation more painfully evident than in Israel's war on Gaza: It is a grim reminder that when the foundational rules of war are ignored or willfully broken, the very core of human dignity is shattered, leaving only devastation behind. Edging close to this abyss, Ukraine's point-for-kill program treads a perilous path, triggering red flags on multiple fronts.
In view of these disturbing developments, the entire international community must urgently recommit to the foundational rules of war laid out in the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law, which seek to protect civilians, medical personnel, and essential infrastructure. Without adherences to these sacred precepts – not just in words, but through decisive action and real accountability – war ceases to be a tragic necessity and instead becomes a ruthless contest where innocent lives are expendable, and humanity itself is a casualty.
A global repudiation of Ukraine's point-for-kill scheme as a merciless game show would surely be regarded by its critics not as mere symbolism, but as a first, vital step towards clawing war back from the brink of gamified barbarism and restoring the moral boundaries of armed conflict.
In a grinding war of attrition, Ukraine's 'Army of Drones: Bonus' system is viewed by its architects not just as efficient, but as essential – a powerful tool that converts every strike, every video, into a force-multiplying advantage. Yet detractors may argue it bears the unmistakable mark of moral degradation: turning warfare into a cold transaction, where the line between combat and competition blurs, and killing becomes a mere pulse-quickening prize game.
In summation, while the e-point system may enhance tactical data collection and resource allocation, it simultaneously engenders deep ethical concerns and troubling battlefield consequences. This duality underscores the complex interplay between technological innovation and the enduring imperative to uphold basic humanitarian principles in contemporary warfare. The real challenge in such a landscape is not only how to win, but how not to lose one's decency along the way.
The litmus test of any civilization is not peace, but how it conducts war. If military conflict becomes an excuse for discarding shared humanity, and prudent generals are replaced with trigger-happy gamers seeking competitive entertainment, George Orwell's dictum may need an update: 'War is sports plus the shooting.'